How to Make a Great Kids’ App

In ev’ry job that must be done There is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.

In the 1964 musical film “Mary Poppins,” all it takes is a snap of the nanny’s fingers and the toys march into the toy box, the clothes fold themselves, and the covers ripple up the beds. What the song argues, and the movie fails to show, is that for kids housework is indeed a game. My daughter likes nothing more than emptying the dishwasher (and then wheeling the lower basket around the room); my son stole the mini-broom from me almost every time that I took it out. Toca House, an iOS app from the Swedish digital play studio Toca Boca, understands the fun of these adult jobs: players scroll up and down a tall, narrow house, selecting first a room and then a task. Clean the windows? Move your finger to rub a cloth against the glass until it shines. Dry the clothes? Lift each shirt or pair of socks and pin it to the clothesline. On the Toca Boca site, the play designer Erik Wahlgren explains, “To small children housekeeping is novel, in their eyes it’s an act of making things nice.”

My children took to the app right away, so quickly that it took me some time to realize its subversive qualities in the world of children’s media. First, your avatar choices include a giant yellow monster wearing a flower wreath, a little boy in a red t-shirt, and a creature whose head looks like a pink house. No aprons, no nannies, no licensed characters. Second, you can play forever, moving from room to room, task to task, rewarded only by a little trumpet fanfare. Third, that’s it: a house. If elegance is refusal, Toca Boca was my first encounter with elegance for children in the App Store.

Given my frustration with the lack of unisex options in kids’ clothes and toys, Toca House and other games from the same maker quickly populated my iPhone and iPad. Toca Tailor, Toca Robot Lab, Toca Kitchen, and Toca Band seemed like a pink-princess-free paradise. A best-selling one, as I quickly found out: thirty-one and a half million downloads, and six of the top ten paid education apps on the iPhone. I hoped that their simplicity, their homely themes, their oddball and unbeautiful avatars were all part of a plan. Earlier this spring I met with the Toca Boca co-founder and C.E.O. Björn Jeffery, who was in New York for the American International Toy Fair. And I asked him: Why no pretty girls?

In Toca Tailor, for example, you choose to dress a boy, a girl, a lynx, or a hairy creature who looks a lot like Animal from “The Muppet Show.” The app lets you choose clothes and accessories (hats, shoes, sunglasses), then customize with an array of patterns and findings. These are the paper dolls of the digital age, complete with an option to apply your own photo to a T-shirt or dress. The girl is brunette, with big eyes but few other attributes of Disney girlhood. Her long hair even looks unbrushed. “She was prettier before we changed her,” says Jeffery, pulling out his iPhone to show me an earlier version: a blue-eyed blonde, her hair sculpted in waves. “We could have called the app Toca Dress-Up,” he laughs. “Tailor turns out to be not a word Americans are that familiar with, so arguably we could have sold more originally with one of the other names.” But they didn’t choose another name. “It was a very intentional design decision: we don’t make toys for boys, we don’t make toys for girls, we make toys for kids.”

The refusal of beauty is even more acute on Toca Hair Salon 2, the best-selling app for Toca Boca. Hair Salon is actually an improvement on a kitsch-classic toy of the nineteen-seventies, the Barbie head with synthetic hair you could style and a face you could make up. Problem was, at some point you always got tired of barrettes and curlers, and wanted to cut bangs. Or bleach blonde. “Fun once, disappointing for a lifetime,” Jeffery deadpans. In Toca Hair Salon there are no wrong moves: you can cut, color, wash, style, accessorize, then start all over again. There’s also no Barbie: the app’s origins as the Hairy Hippy Hair Salon, where “you had to clean him up and shape him into a human,” remain in heads that range from a lion to a pink-haired androgyne. “It is nice to see it can pay off to care about design,” says Jeffery. “Everybody doesn’t want to buy a princess app; maybe they are only buying them because that’s what’s available.”

Thinking about Barbie heads and paper dolls made me realize how many Toca Boca apps are based on the popular toys of my own childhood, many made by Fisher-Price or Little Tikes. Toca Store equals the cash register with the drawer that dings plus the plastic shopping cart kids fight over on the playground. Toca Train equals Thomas, yes, but also the Brio of earlier generations. Toca Doctor, Operation. Jeffery’s co-founder, the interaction designer Emil Ovemar, did much of the research in physical toys, ordering old toy catalogs from eBay. “Why is that still fun?” they asked of the tea set, the Frisbee, Monopoly. And then, “What’s intrinsically there that could be transferred to a screen?”

To understand their attitude toward play, it helps to know that Jeffery and Ovemar met in 2010, working together on a research project centered on the notion that “a larger iPhone-esque device was going to enter the market.” Bonnier, the two-hundred-year-old Swedish media company that employed them then and still does, had acquired eighteen specialist and enthusiast titles from Time Inc., including Field & Stream, Parenting, and Popular Science, in 2007. How could these be translated for what we now know as the iPad? The result was a tool to make digital magazines, the platform now known as Mag+, used by New York magazine, Shape, Macworld, and many more.

“There were so many bets we had to make beforehand” on that project, Jeffery says, not least of which was that people would be reading on their devices. After the iPad launched, they found something new: “What are they actually doing? They are playing games. It is a device that you buy and share in a family. Suddenly children had access to devices that are disproportionately good compared to a LeapPad”—a learning tablet that can be stocked with educational games, often featuring characters from TV shows. “You hand it to them and it costs six hundred dollars, it is made of glass…. It doesn’t make sense, and yet that’s what’s happening.” Jeffery and Ovemar decided to focus on what happens next: now that your three-year-old has your iPad, what can she do?

Their first app, released in 2011 and called Toca Helicopter Taxi, they now regard as somewhat of a failure. It used the iPhone or iPad camera and gyroscope to allow you to “fly” a helicopter to pick someone up. When you go in for a landing the phone senses it, and places a character “in” your helicopter. “It was too complex conceptually, and it didn’t take the touch screen into account. Kids touch the helicopter and expect something to happen,” Jeffery says. In trying to exploit all of the iPad’s gadgets, they had leapt past kids’ idea of a good time.

Their second app, designed specifically for the iPad, was a runaway success. Toca Tea Party began as a paper prototype, with cutouts of teapots and cups and saucers sitting on top of an iPad. They set out these elements and let some children play (they now test all their digital toys on real kids). “Originally the idea was to make the food, but the kids just wanted to get past that part,” says Jeffery. “Now we have premade cakes but you get to set the table. One of the most appreciated features was spilling. That came from the kids. ‘Ooooh, he spilled!’ ”

Toca Tea Party is also a multiplayer, interactive experience: you can sit three kids around the iPad, and each one gets a drink and a plate, a chance to pour, spill, and wipe up. In Hanna Rosin’s recent Atlantic cover story, “The Touch-Screen Generation,” she describes the iPad as functioning “like a tea table without legs.” At the end, when the last doughnut is eaten (tap, tap, tap on the plate), a basin of water pops up and everyone can put their dishes in the sink. “We got feedback saying, ‘We want to do more dishes!,’ ” Jeffery says. “No adult has said that ever. Kids just want to participate, and housework is an environment they are familiar with.” Toca House offers much more virtual cleaning: mopping, laundry, dishwashing, and (my personal favorite) ironing that never ends in scorching or ironed-in wrinkles. Jeffery says they have gotten a lot of response from parents of children with autism on Toca House, which they can use to practice everyday tasks—without real-world frustration.

Although the praise from the autism community was unexpected, a frictionless play environment was part of Toca Boca’s mission from the start. Toca Boca apps have no levels, no rewards, no beginning, middle, and end. They also have almost no words, because much of their target market can’t read. Why frustrate the kids with written instructions? And why pay to have those instructions translated into the languages of the hundred and forty-six countries where the apps are sold?

“If you look at what’s available in the App Store, almost everything is in the learning category, only books and games,” says Jeffery. “That’s how adults play. Read a book, play Angry Birds on your phone. But you would rarely pick up a doll… which is a shame.” What Toca Boca is trying to do is open up the digital experience, let kids make mistakes, figure it out as they go along—without getting eaten by a zombie, or pigeonholed as a princess.